Are there any good places to find more information about MapD charting? I have seen the documentation but I have gotten confused on what MapD charting really brings to the table. I have not ever actually used d3 or dc (currently working through some tutorials to bring my knowledge up to speed for that) but it seems like it is very intertwined with them and I am not sure what is MapD charting is actually doing beyond being an interface to call d3 and dc methods. If anyone has a high level explanation of why it is used and how it connects with the rest of the MapD ecosystem it would be greatly appreciated!

Mapd-charting is originally a fork of dc and very close to its interface, yes. Like dc, it is meant to bridge the gap between d3 and crossfilter. There are two main, high-level differences between mapd-charting and its predecessor:

mapd-crossfilter integration. mapd-crossfilter provides a similar interface to the original crossfilter, but it sends SQL requests to OmniSciDB to do the filtering and retrieve data instead. This means you can make charts to visualize way larger amounts of data than you could do client-side only - and with nearly instant crossfiltering on it, too - using the speed of OmniSciDB behind the scenes.

Mapbox-based charts using the backend rendering of OmniSciDB. There are examples of each of these in the mapd-charting documentation page. Similarly, this allows rendering very large amounts of geospatial data (points, linestrings, or polygons) with OmniSciDB and showing the result on a map, with crossfiltering features as well.

Hope this was what you were looking for. Don’t hesitate with any further questions!